Genesys Launches G-Nine CX Framework

Genesys on Monday introduced G-Nine as the innovation framework underlying all of its product offerings.

"Think of G-Nine as the Genesys innovation framework that guides many aspects of our business -- product strategy being one of those," said Genesys CMO Merijn te Booij.

"Within the G-Nine innovation framework, we have defined our themes related to technology and consumer trends that we'll focus on in the next two years," he told CRM Buyer.

Among G-Nine's initial capabilities:

Smart App Automation, with more than 80 predefined micro-applications for voice and digital self-service;

Asynchronous messaging, through Genesys Hub, in often-used channels such as Facebook Messenger Slack, Skype and WeChat;

Next-generation engagement, which extends the customer experience into the Internet of Things to determine in real time the best course of action given user context, resource availibility, customer profile and business attributes;

Bring-Your-Own Bot, which lets corporations bring their own bots, such as those powered by IBM Watson, to the Genesys customer experience platform; and

Kate, which is customer service-specific artificial intelligence in a personified AI ecosystem.

"Depending upon the platform, some capabilities, like smart app automation and asynchronous messaging, are currently available to customers," te Booij said. "Others will be rolled out in the coming months."

Extending Genesys to Users' Current Systems

Kate brings together the capabilities of blended AI, such as using Salesforce Einstein for CRM and IBM Watson for big data. It has its own micro apps and natural language understanding.

The capabilities of the bots customers choose to bring in will blend seamlessly with native Genesys AI and machine learning systems to offer a deeper understanding of customer interactions across channels, te Booij noted.

"The Genesys platform is extremely open, so it can be extended to any AI or machine learning-based bot," he added.

Next-generation engagement, which aims to extend the customer experience into the IoT, can be used "to bring in contextual IoT data to help with the customer experience," Wang told CRM Buyer.

The advantage of next-generation engagement "is in the digital channels blended back to traditional ones," he suggested. "Think chatbots, virtual assistance and contact centers."

On the other hand, "it's not completely clear how much G-Nine is a suite of offerings versus a development toolkit," said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research at Nucleus Research.

"It will be interring to see how G-Nine innovations can be plucked and integrated from Genesys to other platforms," she told CRM Buyer.

Plugging in the AI Stuff

"AI and virtual assistants are all the rage in the customer experience, and Genesys is no exception," Wettemann remarked.

Genesys last year completed the acquisition of Interactive Intelligence, and this "both gave Genesys a modern cloud platform and a customer base that was already innovating at cloud pace," she noted.

AI needs seven key components in order to work, according to Constellation's Wang. It requires lots of data; compute power; great math talent and algorithms; time compression; domain expertise; great interactive UX-like chat, vision and speech; and a good recommendation engine.

"Genesys is providing the algorithms and leveraging the data in the contact center and knowledge repositories," Wang said.

Kate "is a good start, but it needs much work. It's more advanced than Cortana but not as good as TensorFlow," he observed.

"Given the flurry of AI and intelligent agent announcements in the field over the past few quarters," said Wettemann, "Genesys will have to show both technically and from a time-to-value perspective how Kate -- and the other new innovations -- deliver, compared with the competition."

Richard Adhikari has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2008. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, mobile technologies, CRM, databases, software development, mainframe and mid-range computing, and application development. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including Information Week and Computerworld. He is the author of two books on client/server technology.
Email Richard.